[sdiy] Freak at Home

[Rick Jansen]

jhaible wrote:
>>So you don't like Kraftwerk, eh?
> 
> 
> I'm afraid I'm not a Kraftwerk fan, no.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to ban you now ;-)


> I was always leaning more on the mystical / "cosmical" / organic
> side of electronic music than on the technical side. (stange for
> someone who also builds machines ...)
> 
> Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream (Zeit !!), Popol Vuh, Brian Eno
> were the heroes of my youth. (Even Vangelis and some Kitaro.)
> 
> Maybe I'm doing Kraftwerk wrong (in that case I apologize), but
> I always had the impression that their focus was on the coldness,
> un-human-ness and technical nature of electronic music, while
> the above mentioned artist tried to achieve the opposite.
> All right: The "cosmos" which was evoked by Tangerine Dream
> was a cold one, too - but certainly a very different kind of "cold".
> Hard to put into words - I better stop now.

Well, it's a bit off-topic, but I'm allowing myself one message
about this. I'm a looooong time Kraftwerk "fan" (awful word for
a grown man).

Kraftwerk does technology-inspired music, but people tend to take them
rather too seriously. It's Kraftwerk's own fault of course, they
created a rather extreme image. But guys playing pocket calculators
on top of their head on stage are not what they appear. More
importantly, their albums don't bore me at all after all these years.
I'm still very fond of Trans Europa Express, especially Europa Endlos
I still have to try and recreate. They did very clever things with
a timed echo there... And isn't Radio Aktivitaet a fun album, full
of little experiments.

I went to Paris last September, Kraftwerk played live. I was aghast
to see they scrapped the big Kling-Klang studio on stage. Now it's
just 4 guys and 4 laptops. I'm afraid musically there was nothing new
(to my ears), many tracks sounded *exactly* like on previous performances.
It looked like a canned performance mostly. What a difference with their
great concerts in the early 80's, when they really did werk on stage.
Worse even, the guys on stage did not seem to enjoy themselves. Just
standing there, like dummies. Sad!

-- 
Rick Jansen
__
rja at euronet.nl    http://www.euronet.nl/~rja
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